Creating the Meganoid trailer, and working toward release

This is just a little teaser of the trailer I’ve been making this week. The full trailer is a little over a minute, and I’ll put it online when the game releases (cause it hopefully tickles people to go and buy the game when they see it!)

Creating the trailer I had a few problems, one is that Meganoid doesn’t come with a soundtrack. It comes with a lot of ambient sound and cool sound-effects, but no music. One reason is that I’ve been blasting through the development work, and since I want to release at the end of March (6 years after the original one, who launched in March 2011) there is just a very short window for Gavin to actually do music !

The second reason is that I couldn’t figure out the style of music, and Gavin agreed it was difficult to pin point. The game is an arcade platformer, but it’s also an exploration rogue-like game. With sound-effects helping you navigate the hazards, it’s a difficult one.

So back to the trailer.. trailers suck without music! With the game not having any music.. where do I find music for the trailer? how do I break the silence!? Well, I finally found a nice tune in the Orangepixel archives from Groundskeeper2 that did fit the action I was putting in the trailer.

But even with the music, there was something missing. Checking some other game trailers I figured it could be interesting to have a voice over. To test it I wrote down a short script, used a voice-recorder on my phone, and did a test run. It actually made the trailer more interesting !

Luckily I found the help of the famous “McFunkypants” (follow or contact him if you got voice work!) who did an awesome job doing the voice-over (much better than my own silly attempt).

So, the trailer is done! it’s awesome, it’s fun, and it will be live in a few weeks when the game launches.

Rest of this week I’ve been polishing the game, removing bugs, adding a few more interesting idea’s and features, and having a lot of fun trying to survive the game (spoiler: I still haven’t made it past world 2).

So, that leaves store-pages, website, and getting the business side of things set – price? launch discounts? short and quick pre-order window? still much to think about!

Orangepixel (@orangepixel) is a Dutch one-man game developer comprised of Pascal Bestebroer, with help from Aline on social-media and support, and freelancers like musician Gavin Harrison (@GHarrisonSounds), artwork artist Scott Tykoski (@ScottTykoski) and others.